


A Prized Posession

by Cryowen



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Background Character Death, Gen, Photography, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 14:52:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11382462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryowen/pseuds/Cryowen
Summary: Examining a photo album Reinhardt received as a gift the Christmas before joining the military, and has kept through the Recall.





	A Prized Posession

**Author's Note:**

> A drabble for an anon prompt I received on my Reinhardt RP blog. This and more can be found at Bloghardt on Tumblr.

In the box of personal belongings tucked under Reinhardt’s desk at the Watchpoint, there’s a photo album about the size of a Russian novel and an instant-print camera that has seen better days.

The first few pictures are of a Christmas tree-- nearly overloaded with mis-matching ornaments, and icicles a mixture of opaque cast plastic and twists of tin-- blurry and not quite in focus. In a lower corner beneath a cluster of shots featuring three young women, a young man that could only be Reinhardt himself, and their parents; was written “Weihnachten 2031″ in gold glitter pen. The same pen, and others like it, deface similar photos for the next two pages.

There are photographs of Eichenwalde in the spring. One of the women from the earlier pictures-- brown hair now cut short-- strikes an exaggerated pose beside a Crusader recruitment poster. The gold glitter pen returns once more, scrawling “Surprise!” along a picture of a bar counter where Reinhardt’s name had been carved in the same handwriting.

A decade recorded in candid snaps and posed photos. One of the poster-boy with his poster, another two with friends. Then the photos stop. There are fits and starts. A landscape, a skyline. Tense smiles and battered armor. Christmas of 2044 is marked by the snowy window of a military train, and a photo added later-- taken by a different camera-- of a black-haired baby girl with a blue package bow stuck on her head.

Familiar faces appear as pictures become more frequent again. Jack and Gabriel; both too serious for their own health and not serious at all, in turns. Amelie and Gerard, attached at the hip. Torbjörn, who always seemed to know when the camera was around and refused to smile except for Angela. Ana and Fareeha, fiercely independent child that she is and always with a pose. Jesse; equally fierce and even more stubborn, though not a child in the least. Angela, primary camera-thief. Winston, who always blinked. Genji; reclusive at first, but creeping closer to the camera as the pages go on until he and Jesse have appeared in three inappropriate selfies. Lena; collapsed against their gear after the King’s Row mission, still for the first time he’d seen her.

There are birthdays and holidays. Weekends and vacations. Smiles and ridiculous faces, with poses that need a second person to keep the first from falling over. New places, new people. Trips home to visit family; a brown-haired sister now with brown-haired twins who sit in the park with their grandmother, their grandfather now absent. Trips home to visit comrades, but the pictures are not of them.

The first face of Overwatch to disappear from the album is Amelie. Then Gerard. Ana not long after. Jesse, not long after her, and then Genji. Then no more foreign bases, no more dropships, no more Torbjörn patching his armor or Lena trying to lift his hammer. Somewhere along the way, the smiles started disappearing too.

There are more pictures of his sisters, of their children, of his mother before there aren’t. There are no white lilies at her wake, because she hated “funeral flowers”, so there are orange ones instead.

Brigitte and the van appear. There are landscapes and skylines again. Old places and new ones. New people who appear only once. Dates and names in blue pen, sans glitter. A young girl, her lion plush in a fresh suit of armor.

There is a small pile of photographs sitting on the desk. New faces, with their names written neatly in blue glitter pen. Old faces that have gotten older, in an old place, but the smiles are back. Lena still can’t lift the hammer, Genji still bombs the background of almost every photo, and the eye-patch makes Ana’s wink look ridiculous. At the bottom is a picture of the Watchpoint, taken from the coast, and written in the margin below it: “Home”.


End file.
